Meet Sonny | Dentist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Sonny and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Sonny, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
Honestly? Jasmine and I both spent time working in corporate dental chains early in our careers, and we kept running into the same wall. The pressure to hit production numbers, the scripts, the upsells patients didn’t actually need. None of it sat right with us. You’d see a patient who needed one thing, and the system was nudging you toward five. That’s not why either of us went to dental school.

So at a certain point we just looked at each other and said, why are we doing this for someone else’s bottom line? We’re brother and sister, we trust each other, we have the same values about how patients should be treated. Let’s go build the kind of practice we actually want to work at, one where the only person we have to answer to is the patient sitting in the chair.

That’s really what Best Dental came out of. Not some grand business plan. Just two siblings who wanted the freedom to practice dentistry the way it should be practiced.

Can you give our readers an introduction to your business? Maybe you can share a bit about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Best Dental is a general and cosmetic dental practice in Richmond, Texas, run by me and my sister, Dr. Jasmine Naderi. We do pretty much everything in-house: cleanings, fillings, crowns, root canals, extractions, wisdom teeth, Invisalign, veneers, dentures, dental implants. The idea from day one was to be the practice families could go to for almost anything without getting bounced around to three different specialists.

What sets us apart, honestly, is two things. The first is that we’re a brother-sister team. There’s no corporate parent, no investor group, no rotating roster of associate dentists. When you come in, you see Jasmine or you see me, and it stays that way. Patients tell us all the time that the family-run feel is something they didn’t know they were missing until they had it. We know our regulars by name. We remember their kids. That’s not a marketing line, that’s just how a small practice actually works when the people whose names are on the door are the people doing the dentistry.

The second is affordability and transparent pricing. We made a deliberate decision early on that we weren’t going to play games with pricing. A wisdom tooth extraction at our office is $250 flat, regardless of how impacted it is. Dentures are $1,250. We don’t quote you one number on the phone and another number in the chair. Dentistry already has a reputation for surprise bills, and we wanted to be the practice that broke that pattern. If we can do something for less, we charge less. If we can save someone a procedure they don’t actually need, we tell them.

Was it easy getting here? Not even close. The hardest part by a mile was building a patient base from zero. When you open a practice, nobody knows you exist. You can have the best training, the best chairside manner, the best equipment, and it doesn’t matter if the schedule is empty. Those first months are humbling. You sit there between appointments thinking about overhead, payroll, the loans you took out to make this happen. Jasmine and I had to trust that if we just did right by every single patient who walked in, eventually it would compound. And it did. One patient told two, two told four, and slowly the schedule filled in. There’s no shortcut for that. You earn it one mouth at a time.

The biggest lesson from all of it is that patients can tell when you actually care. They can tell within the first five minutes. They can tell whether you’re rushing them out the door, whether you’re recommending things they don’t need, whether you actually listened when they told you what they were worried about. People are smart. They’ve been to enough doctors and dentists in their lives to know the difference between someone who’s going through the motions and someone who’s genuinely trying to help them. That’s the whole game. If you get that part right, everything else, the growth, the referrals, the reputation, takes care of itself.

What I’d want the world to know about Best Dental is pretty simple. We’re two siblings who built this thing from nothing because we wanted to do dentistry the right way. We’re not the biggest practice in Houston, we don’t want to be. We just want to be the one our patients trust, the one they send their family to, and the one that’s still here doing it the same way ten and twenty years from now.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Alright, if my best friend was in town for a week, here’s roughly how I’d run it.

Day 1, ease them in. Pick them up from the airport and head straight to one of the great Tex-Mex spots in town. Houston has a hundred of them and you can’t really go wrong. Margaritas, queso, the whole thing. Then a slow walk around the Museum District just to stretch the legs and let them see how green Houston actually is. People who’ve never been here picture concrete and freeways. The Museum District flips that expectation pretty fast.

Day 2, museums and Hermann Park. Spend the morning at one of the big museums. The natural science museum is a strong pick, the fine arts museum if they’re more into that. Either way, you can kill three or four hours easy. Lunch somewhere in the area, then walk Hermann Park, hit the Japanese Garden, ride the little train if you’re feeling silly. End the day with dinner in Montrose. Montrose has the best concentration of interesting restaurants in the city and it’s where I’d take anyone who wants to feel like they’re eating well.

Day 3, the Heights. The Heights is the neighborhood I’d actually want to live in if I weren’t out in Fort Bend. Spend the morning walking around, checking out the antique shops and the local boutiques. Lunch at one of the new-school sandwich or barbecue spots. Coffee at one of the independent coffee shops in the afternoon. Then a long dinner at one of the chef-driven places. The Heights has that small-town-inside-a-big-city feel that’s hard to find anywhere else in Houston.

Day 4, food day, all in. Houston is one of the most underrated food cities in the country and I’d spend a full day proving it. Breakfast tacos from a truck or hole-in-the-wall in the morning. Vietnamese for lunch, because Houston’s Vietnamese food scene is honestly world-class. Afternoon dim sum or boba in the Asiatown area. Dinner somewhere doing something interesting, whether that’s Nigerian, Indo-Pak, Persian, Ethiopian, whatever. The point of this day is to show them that the diversity here isn’t just talk. You can eat a different country’s food every meal for a month and not run out.

Day 5, sports and downtown. If the timing works out, an Astros game or a Rockets game depending on the season. The atmosphere at either is a good time even if you don’t follow the team. Walk around downtown before or after, hit the tunnels if it’s a weekday, check out one of the rooftop bars in the evening. Houston’s downtown gets dismissed a lot, but it’s actually got some great spots if you know where to look.

Day 6, nature day. People don’t realize how much green space Houston has. Go for a walk along Buffalo Bayou, rent kayaks if you’re up for it. Spend a few hours outside, then head over to one of the bigger parks for a picnic or just to sit. Ends up being the most relaxing day of the trip. Dinner that night somewhere lowkey, maybe a great pizza spot or one of the neighborhood gastropubs.

Day 7, send them off right. Big brunch on the last day, the kind of place with a long menu and good coffee. Then maybe one more thing they wanted to do, a shop they wanted to hit, a neighborhood they wanted to see again. End the trip with one more great meal so the last memory is a good one. That’s how Houston gets you. It doesn’t blow you away on day one, it just keeps quietly delivering until you realize on the way to the airport that you’re already planning the next trip back.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
The biggest shoutout has to go to our parents. Neither Jasmine nor I would be here without what they put in. Dental school is brutal financially and emotionally, and they carried us through it in ways we probably didn’t fully appreciate at the time. Immigrant work ethic is a real thing. They modeled what it looks like to put your head down, build something, and not complain about it. A lot of how we run Best Dental, the way we treat staff, the way we treat patients, comes straight from how they raised us.

The other shoutout goes to the Richmond and Fort Bend community. We didn’t take a single patient for granted when we opened, and we still don’t. People had options. They had the big chains, they had practices that had been around for decades, and a lot of them took a chance on two young siblings who were just starting out. The patients who walked in those first few months and then told their friends, those are the people who built this practice. Word of mouth in this community is everything, and we owe a huge amount to the families who vouched for us.

Website: https://richmondtxdentists.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrJasmineNaderi/

Image Credits
Sonny Naderi